Disguised As Dishcloths Pile, Man Hides Inside IKEA

By Ben PopkenMarch 6, 2009

Some German’s art project is to engage in “urban camouflage” by creating three different ghillie suits made of bulk IKEA items: piles of dishcloths, boxes, and shopping bags. Then he goes and “hides” out in the open inside the IKEA, blending in with his surroundings and only disturbing shoppers when he moves. Hilarious, brilliant! Here are the videos so you get the full effect:

@Jay Dutton: I think the point is more to highlight the vast inconsequential nature of all of the piles of consumer goods and their associated refuse surrounding anyone at any given moment. It’s more meaningful in that context to have people just walk past and not notice, or be vaguely curious about slow movement and be forced to think about the giant pile of X, than it is to play a childish game of BOO.

If the point was to spook people, I’m sure he’d have lots of videos of himself doing that. That’s not the point, and actually counterproductive to the point I believe he’s trying to make.

@Mike8813: TVs appear to the human eye as a constant image, but are actually refreshing itself about 30 times a second, usually redrawing from top to bottom. Cameras shoot about 30 frames per second, sometimes, the camera is shooting faster or out of sync with the refresh rate and “catches” the TV mid refresh. This gives the effect you describe.

CRTs (computer screens or TV screens) will appear to flicker when caught on camera because the Cathode Ray (The CR in CRT) actually redraws the phosphors of the tube (screen) by quickly scanning across and down many times a second, constantly refreshing the image by making the phosphor dots glow. The speed of drawing is the “refresh rate”.

To a human eye, this looks like a continuous image, but when captured by a video camera, often the frame rate of the camera isn’t quite the same as the “refresh rate” of the screen, and so the camera catches the screen in between redraws, thus the “flicker”.

A similar effect is why some people get headaches when using CRT computer monitors under fluorescent lighting.

@ChicagoKev: Which is why you should turn up the refresh rate of your CRT monitor as high as you can (assuming image looks OK).

I can’t count the number of people with PCs running at 60Hz at my office building (which still has a lot of CRTs) because IT is too dumb to know it causes eye fatigue. I’ll change it for people I know, and they always say it makes it SO much easier to look at the screen.

That’s an IKEA in Sweden, according to the video description on the youtube page…and it’s possible it’s early in the morning or later at night. In any case, it’s also possible not everyone is as fascinated with IKEA in Sweden as they are here in the US.

Can anyone confirm that it’s in Sweden? I can’t tell if the price signs have a dollar sign or something else.